According to the online portal Gizmodo, the local government officials are now not only “at a loss as to who is responsible for it or what the systems are for”, they “also seem to be quite annoyed that they have to dismantle the crap once more and once more”.
According to Tyler Fonarow of the Salt Lake City Public Lands Department, around a dozen new antenna systems have recently been found in the city’s administered lands — and it’s believed there are more. The newly discovered devices were “screwed to various peaks and crests and ridges around the foothills of the mountains” and were partially removed by the city, as Fonarow explained to the Coast to Coast news portal.
Connection to university?
Local news station KSL-5 also references an antenna found on the University of Utah campus. According to the university, it is not yet known whether there is a connection to the other systems.
“As far as we know, the tower on the university campus neither belongs to the university nor is it operated by it,” it said in a broadcast. Since being alerted by the city to the unauthorized antennas, however, the company has been actively working with the relevant authorities “to determine whether a member of our campus community is connected to the towers”.
Not enough “to speculate”
The antennas had no identifying marks, according to Fonarow, who admitted to KSL-5 that we still don’t know enough “to speculate what it is regarding”. Fonarow expects information, among other things, from the apparently still pending detailed examination of the devices found. “To be honest, we didn’t even open the box,” says Fonarow, referring to the battery boxes found near the antennas.
At the same time, Fonarov confirmed the suspicion that the antennas “might have something to do with cryptocurrency”. There is an association in the room with a network where the antennas might be used to mine a cryptocurrency known as helium. It remains to be seen whether the trail to the Helium Network will hold up and, as noted by the IT portal Heise, among others, is no more than one of several attempts at an explanation.
“We want to stop this now”
According to Fonarow, it is still completely open whether anyone can ever be prosecuted for the unauthorized devices. Regardless, Salt Lake City “wants to stop this now before it becomes a dumping ground for dozens more antennas.”
“Presumably, by drawing attention to the problem, the city hopes that whoever installs the devices will put an end to the mysterious project,” says Coast to Coast, referring to the “notorious monolith craze” around two years ago, “who also started in Utah”. A metal stele erected in the Utah desert by people who were still unknown then made headlines around the world – also because other such objects suddenly appeared elsewhere, including in Upper Austria.
